Windows 10: Why do my restore points vanish?

I have never had many restore points on my 2-in-1 Tablet, presumably to do with the small size of the SSD. But recently I have found the couple or so I normally have, disappear every day. I have been having to replace them every few hours. Why is this and what can I do about it?

It does not seem to be anything to do with the configuration in the Protection configuration menu --- it has not been changed, and there are several GBs of space allocated. Even so, is it to do with the fact that the free space on my C drive is low and frequently drops lower? OR what?

:)

 

Why are my recent Restore Points being deleted (Version 1607)

Restore points also age out, and more quickly than they did on Windows 7. In Windows 7 a restore point could be 90 days old. That's like eating leftovers from 90 days ago. Yuck!

Restore points have too many ifs, ands, and buts to be useful, particularly when it's so easy to make an image backup. I can't tell you how many times I've
wrecked experimented with my computer and was saved by a backup.

But image backups also have issues:

• Most people don't even know what they are.
• The image utility included with Windows 10 is limited and inconvenient.
• If people don't separately backup their user data, or keep it in a separate partition, restoring a backup also means restoring old user data.

In the end it turns out like many other things involving technology: People who have the time and the inclination to learn how to do things reap the rewards, and everybody else gets sky-rewed.

 

Why are my recent Restore Points being deleted (Version 1607)

OMG. This question has been asked and answered so many time. Why don't people search first to see if their question was already asked and answered?

Windows 10 is not Windows 7.

Restore points have a limited useful life.

If you were able to restore a restore point made prior to a major update, your operating system would contain an unstable mixture of old and new system files that could cause it to crash.

A restore point is not a backup.

 

Based on your specs, 29GB is rather small to hold the OS any apps you install, the pagefile, and restore points. Windows does routine maintenance and is always watching storage available. It is most likely sacrificing the restore points to keep the system from crashing with an "out of space" error. My best guess at the moment. Take a screenshot of this:





and post back the results. TC...

 

I just create image backups on my tablet to my sd card to save space on main drive. Whilst generally a fan of restore points, they are less critical (imo) on a tablet as an image recovery only takes 10 minutes,

 

II
Snip of Drive C storage.

I used to have a much enhanced 'Snipping Tool' which had all sorts of features beyond the basic Snip, including recording sound and much more. I accessed it via a Tile but many of my Tiles have vanished for some reason, including that one. Once activated it would drop down from the top of the screen. At the moment I cannot find it by searching the computer or web, nor can I find the folder which held my Snips / Clips. I am not sure what it was called but have searched for 'Snipping' and 'Clipping'. I am surprised I have not found reference to it searching the Web. Can you help me find it?

 

I found that 60GB is a comfortable size for proper operation.

 

You might be referring to Screenpresso... Screenpresso: The Ultimate Screen Capture Tool for Windows

P.S. - What Wolfgang said above is valid (very!). 28GB is just gonna cause you issues going forward.

 

First, I have sorted the mystery over 'enhanced Snips'. It is a Microsoft Garage project released in August 2015 which despite being a really good versatile utility, a great advance on Snipping Tool, seems to have very little attention. Digging down I did find quite a lot of detail (some links below) but especially here in this forum a good illustrated article www.tenforums.com/.../21638-office-snip-create-annotate-narrate- screenshots.html.

A reason for lack of visibility apart from confusion with the useful but much more basic Snipping Tool is lack of agreement on what to call it, hence what to search for: variously Snip, Microsoft Snip, Snipping Editor, Office Snip, Snipping Beta, et al.

Snip

Hands-on with Microsoft Snip Beta | Windows Central

Secondly, the comments regarding my small SSD and frequent loss of restore points seem well on target and informative. What puzzles me somewhat is how my free storage still keeps shrinking (even to zero a few days ago) despite all the different things I have been doing to counteract it as best I can --- like deleting all emails before 2016 and transferring as many apps and programs to drive D (and others) as I can, which is my main activity now. My objective is for drive C to be (almost) for the OS / OS apps with everything else on D and other drives.

The idea of a backup disc image elsewhere to C as an alternative to restore points is appealing. I was going to create a disc image a while ago but was put off by the major corruption of Windows 10 caused by the November update bug --- I did not want to backup a quite faulty copy of C. I have changed my mind now. It is clear Microsoft is not going to deliver a fix any time soon or even ever and a badly working copy of W10 (for which a remedy is now available from Tech Tranti) will be better than a non-working one.

 

Use TreeSize Free to see, what is taking space. Do not forget to cleanup regularly.

For daily cleanup use CCleaner - Standard

For system cleanup use Windows tools, run CMD as admin and enter:

Dism.exe /Online /Cleanup-Image /StartComponentCleanup

cleanmgr /sageset:65535 & cleanmgr /sagerun:65535

 

Update. Following a clean reinstall of Window 10 I now normally have 10 plus GB free on my SSD, instead of less than 5 GB. Plus (almost) all apps / programs and other files have been transferred to removable drives and the Cloud, leaving C amost exclusively for the OS. It is working much better as a result and the restore points I create (which is where this discussion started) remain untouched.

 

But still - I would not rely on those restore points. They have a life of their own. If you want to have a means to roll back, make images. Those you control yourself.